The problem of different people being unable to understand one another is as old as the legend of the Tower of Babylon. When a first person who speaks a first language wishes to communicate with a second person who speaks a second language, some sort of translator needs to be used. Preferably the translator is a human translator who understands both languages very well, and can translate cultural nuances from one language to another. However, many people do not have access to a human translator, and must rely upon machine translations.
There are many machine translators available for users with access to the internet. For example, the websites http://translate.google.com and http://babelfish.yahoo.com both provide relatively accurate machine translations of languages when a word or phrase is typed into a web user interface. However, not all users have access to a web user interface when they need a word or phrase translated from one language to another. In addition, some users might hear a word or phrase in a foreign language, but may not know how to accurately spell or type the word or phrase into a keyboard user interface.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,882,681 to Brotz teaches a handheld oral translating device which will listen to a phrase in one language, and will output an oral translation of the phrase through a machine speaker in the device. In this way, Brotz's device provides simultaneous translation of a conversation between a user of the device that speaks a first language, and another user of the device that speaks a second language, seamlessly performing both reception of a phrase and transmission of a translated phrase. Brotz's device, however, uses machine-synthesized phonemes to produce the translated phrase, which sounds artificial and stilted to a normal user.
US2006/0271370 to Li and WO2010025460 to Kent both teach oral translation devices that produce a translated phrase that mimics a user's voice. Kent's device requires a user to create a user-stored dictionary consisting of stored phones, diphones, triphones, half-syllables, words, and other basic sound units in order to construct any word for a target language. Li's device estimates and saves a speaker's speech characteristics, such as a speaker's pitch and timber, and then uses the saved pitch and timbre to synthesize speech. Li's device even locks onto a speaker's location so as to only translate words uttered from that speaker location. Li's device, however, fails to account for a speaker that is moving about a room, and requires a locked-on speaker to remain in one place for the duration of the translation session. Other speech translation devices, such as EP1464048 to Palmquist have the same issue.
There is also a need in the art to orally translate a phrase into a local dialect. Many older languages, such as Chinese, have localized to such an extent that people speaking different dialects of the same language frequently cannot even understand one another. Thus, when designing an oral translator, there is a need to not only to translate phrases from one language to another, but also to translate phrases to a language of a specific dialect. US20040044517, US20080195375, and WO2010062542 to Gupta each teach devices that will output a translation into a specific dialect. AU2006201926 to Rigas teaches an oral translation device that uses a GPS to determine the dialect of a region before orally translating that dialect. None of those devices, however, output a voice while mimicking a speaker's voice.
There has been a long-felt need in the art for an oral translating device that mimics a user's voice into a specific regional dialect to allow for a device that will be most akin to the speaker actually speaking in that other language, yet no such device has ever been contemplated nor created.
Thus, there is still a need for oral translation devices which mimic a user's voice into a specific dialect.